Restoring data from a non bootable corrupt Windows file system

In this example, we want to restore client data from a non bootable corrupt Windows file system on a working harddisk. The client want the restored data on compact disc (CD) media.

This procedure can be used with other operating systems and file systems as well.

We attach the harddisk to a computer, that support the harddisk interface, and boot the computer with a Back Track Live CD.

Back Track is a Linux operating system, that can boot from CD. Back Tracks mounts file systems automatically. Back Track comes with a huge amount of tools, ready to use.

We can now access the client data.

ls /mnt/hda1

In order to write the client data to CD, we need to transfer the files to a FreeBSD network file system from which, an Ubuntu computer, that has a CD writer, can access the files. We use secure copy (scp) to transfer the files.

scp -r /mnt/hda1 starnix@starnix:temporary

In order to preserve file names and support multiple CD’s, we archive and split the data using zip.

cd temporary
zip -s 670m -r disk hda1
ls -ld disk.z*

The result is a number of zip archives, that has been split into the necessary number of archives in order to fit each CD media. We can now write the data to CD’s. We do this by inserting an empty CD media into the Ubuntu computer. Brasero disc writer offers to write our data to the CD. We drag the first archive and writes the data to disc. Note, that the first split archive is the z01 and the last is the zip.

The client can now copy the archives from the CD’s, unzip the archives and restore the files as necessary.